We fly home tomorrow. Malaysia was wonderful and I want to come back. I’m pretty sure Noah will be invited to the conference again next year and we will be in the country for more than two weeks next time. We will get out of KL and explore the more rural states. Everyone has told us to go to Penang and my response is, “Ok!” I met a really nice lady at the Batu Caves and she says she wants to spend a lot of time feeding me. Ok!

Before this trip Scotland and New Zealand were my bar for friendliness and I think it just got raised. I feel welcome here.

For the entire nation there are only .6% of people living below the poverty line. In the US it’s about 14%. It is fascinating being in a place where most of the country is ok. I mean, there is still a big difference between the lifestyles of the rich and the lower middle class… but the difference isn’t starvation and suffering.

I’m feeling quite good about being in a Muslim country instead of a predominantly Christian country. The difference is feeling so very humane.

I am going to see if it is possible to get another massage tonight before we fly home. That would be pretty ridiculously awesome. It would make the plane flight 100% better. Carrying the baby all the time jacks me up.

So we are going home to try to get the house ready and sell it. We will spend as much of January and February as possible freezing our asses off in Washington DC. That’s going to feel like a harsh reality after this burning heat. We will probably spend some of March in DC, not sure how much, before going off to Japan for March and part of April. Noah needs to be in Minneapolis in May. We will need to see the orthodontist somewhere in there. Maybe while he is doing his conference the kids and I will go to California. After that there are conferences in the Netherlands and the UK so I’ll get to go see Jenny. August is Nashville. Nothing else is announced for 2019 yet. I assume October will involve Malaysia again.

Today we are going to go see the National Museum. We’ve missed a lot of stuff because we left our sight seeing till the end and things have been a bit more physically stressful than we expected. The Petronas Towers (tallest twin towers in the world) are over 1,000 ft high and we went up to the top. When we came down we had hours of me and the kids feeling shaky and sick so we didn’t go do a bunch of sight seeing.

Oh good. We have lots left to do when we come back.

Eldest Child is just over a day behind on math. I have had such an emotional roller coaster as she’s caught up… but she’s basically there. Her life is going back to normal now and we are all so happy about it. And she’s about halfway through the 4th grade math textbook (which is where she was scheduled to be) so she will be 100% caught up to grade level by the time she starts 6th grade. And she’s going to be used to working at double time speed so I wouldn’t be shocked if she was a bit ahead by high school.

Even though I’ve felt eaten alive by worry over the past few months…. this is basically what the plan has been since she was little. She needed a seriously delayed start. She didn’t have the focus. Trying to force her into academics in first or second grade would have gone poorly. She needed the delay so very much and as a result now that she is busting her ass she has focus and drive she just couldn’t have had while younger.

She is feeling incredibly proud of herself. At this point she cheerfully says, “I still don’t love math, but clearly it is very easy for me. I have natural aptitude.”

That’s an absolutely outstanding attitude for her to have. It’s true. She does have natural aptitude. She can go through hundreds of new, challenging problems in a day and only ask 1-3 questions. And when she gets a problem wrong I can say, “Hm. Maybe you should look at that one again” and she does and then she smacks herself in the forehead and says “Oh good grief. Look, right there I messed up. I should have done x instead.”

I don’t think I had that at her age. I was already convinced I was stupid and bad at math. I hadn’t memorized the multiplication tables yet and I’d already had teachers in 5 schools tell me that I just sucked at math. They kept saying that my brain was wired wrong.

Fuck teachers.

When I got to college and math became more interesting all of a sudden I got better at it but I was still stymied by my complete lack of self confidence. It’s like how teachers told me I was bad at art so I was ready to fight anyone who told me I was artistic until I was in my 30’s. Teachers have so much power and they abuse it so much. I feel so much gratitude that my children are getting to grow up feeling like “I’m good at a lot of things but I don’t have to love everything I’m good at.”

I had a moment of internal ugh when I was talking to some of the speakers from the conference and the question was, “You don’t do anything other than take care of the kids?” Ouch. Yup. I’m a useless lump just sitting with my kids.

Being a private tutor the way I am is a fuck ton of work. No, I don’t also have a job because I would have to only sleep 4-6 hours a day. I am very lucky to only need to do one job. I know it’s a privilege. But schooling my children the way I do is so hard that uhhh more than 90% of parents just couldn’t do it. So acting like it is nothing? Uhm…. ok.

In order to provide the kind of education I’m providing most parents would be spending many tens of thousands of dollars a year. But ok. Yeah. I don’t do anything other than take care of my kids.

I’m an insecure pathetic nitwit.

I spent 10 years preparing for this job and I’m doing it very well. I wish I had more confidence in myself that it is a job worth doing.

Cause the other mothers at the con left their kids at home. The other mothers have real jobs and pay people to be daycare and then put their kids in school. Why am I not doing something with my life?

I would want to jump off a building if I had to do your job. It would kill my soul. I would cry a lot if I only got to see my children for a few hours a day and I was always dealing with sets of behaviors my children learned from other caregivers.

I don’t think it is wrong for other mothers to handle it that way. I have deep wounding that is being healed by the relationships I’m having. I’m hoping that with a few more years of this I will be really ready to watch my babies leave the nest and go off to have their own lives.

The kids and Noah and I had a really fun conversation yesterday about how your parents aren’t always as important as they are at this stage. You will outgrow us. You will have friends and partnerships that replace us. We won’t always be your most important people and we probably shouldn’t be. You can still love us and hopefully you will want to spend some time with us… errr, hopefully y’all will want to spend more time with us than Noah or I want to spend with our own mothers….

But you don’t owe us. We give you this gift of importance and time and love because we want to. Because giving this to you is important to us. That doesn’t mean you owe us back. You get to have your own path and you get to decide how much you include us on it.

Two of the female speakers at the conference brought their mothers. That’s pretty cool. I’d be down with that. But I don’t get to require it.

It is up to you all how much you want me in your life when you are an adult.

I feel incredibly confident that I am not preparing my children to be useless or dependent. I am just enjoying the fuck out of the stage when they are dependent. I don’t need to push them out of the nest any earlier than they want to leave. We all are still enjoying our life together very much and I want to maintain that as long as this works for everyone. Someday it won’t work any more and that will be right and correct when it happens.

We are mostly packed. The clothes we wear today I will wash tonight after we get home (we are all happy to sit around in our underwear in the heat anyway) and I’ll put the bathroom supplies away after we shower tonight.

Then back to California. Back to the violent US.

Noah asked me if I felt like my safety was more at risk in Malaysia from things like muggings or being attacked. I don’t think he expected me to laugh. No. I worry about cars running red lights here. I don’t worry about people attacking me. I worry about that at home where I am surrounded by white men. Not here.

I am afraid of my country. I am a lot less afraid in other places.

I am very grateful that I don’t have to be in the US for the rest of my life. I don’t know where we will land…. but I am grateful that I get to leave a white supremacist nation.